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New England Medical Center Records

Tufts Digital Collections and Archives manages the historical records of the New England Medical Center through a partnership with Tufts Medical Center. The New England Medical Center comprised a consortium of hospitals that became the Tufts Medical Center, the primary teaching hospital for the Tufts University School of Medicine. These collections document the administrative workings of predecessor institutions and umbrella organizations, and include personal papers of physicians. Materials date from 1796 to 2009 and include administrative records, personal papers, photographs, publications, slides and negatives, audiovisual media, sound recordings, and a few artifacts. The collection is open for research with the exception of records containing personally identifiable information (including records protected by HIPAA and FERPA) and administrative records that are less than 20 years old.

The history of the New England Medical Center dates to 1796 with the establishment of the Boston Dispensary. In 1930, the Boards for the Boston Dispensary, the Boston Floating Hospital for Infants and Children (established in 1894), and the Tufts College School of Medicine formed the New England Medical Center (NEMC). NEMC functioned as an umbrella organization for these medical institutions before they officially merged in 1965. The organization was then incorporated as the Tufts-New England Medical Center (T-NEMC). It was the primary teaching hospital for the university’s School of Medicine and also encompassed the pediatric Boston Floating Hospital and the New England Center Hospital (founded in 1939 as the Pratt Diagnostic Hospital).

While individual collections exist for each institution, there was a periodic shifting of departments to and from NEMC/T-NEMC and their constituent institutions. As such, any comprehensive search of a particular topic over time should involve consulting all the NEMC collections. Additionally, some collections from the Tufts University Archives also documents NEMC activities. These collections are included in the section below.